


come tumbling down

by lea_hazel



Category: Glitch (Video Game)
Genre: Alien Mythology/Religion, Apocalypse, Gen, Hell, Optimism, Poetry, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-29
Updated: 2012-12-29
Packaged: 2017-11-22 20:35:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/614073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lea_hazel/pseuds/lea_hazel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the story of Skymaw the Mabbite, and how she learned that Ur was coming to an end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	come tumbling down

> _all the glitchen gather round_   
> _listen to that awful sound_   
> _from hill to glen, from street to town_   
> _the walls of ur come tumbling down._

Skymaw didn't remember when, exactly, she learned that the world was coming to an end. It was sometime near the end of last year, she thought, not long after Zilloween. Her first Zilloween, she thought sadly, and reminisced about all the pumpkins she had carved and sold. It must have been Widdershins, then, she decided. That was when she heard the worst news of all, the worst news _imaginable_. Ur was going to disappear. The year 26 was going to dawn on a particularly sad note. 

"The end is nigh," noted Skymaw in her traveler's journal, and mused sadly about all the future feats that would never be. Once she had been determined to do great things: travel to every part of Ur, plant trees, cultivate herbs, build a magnificent tower! If Ur was ending, she would never be able to do even half those things! She had so looked foreward to learning how to build furniture. The little blue chest of drawers in her one-room bogtree house was too small to hold all the treasures she'd discovered in her wanderings. 

But Primuary was still a new month, and she was a glitch, young and healthy and full of vital imagination. How could she lie down and simply wait for the end? How could she sequester herself sadly in her own home street, however dire the times, when there was still a whole wide Ur out there left to explore? There was far too little time left, and far too much left to achieve. With not a moment to waste, Skymaw shucked her labcoat and put on her best red traveling boots. Ur was waiting for her. 

With her pick and hatchet Skymaw set off to see as much of Ur as possible before it disappeared from under her feet. She crossed the gulleys of Rasana and ventured to the southern-most parts of the boglands, from Chakra Phool onwards. She ventured from the rocky fields of Ormonos to the lush meadows of Lida and back again. When her feet ached she teleported herself across vast distances, snatched in a gut-wernching instant from verdant shady forests to the beating heat of the ancestral desert. With every day that ticked closer to the end, Ur seemed to blossom and erupt with imagination; it seemed to Skymaw that the more she traveled, the more there was to see and learn and experience. The end was nigh, but the dying days were good days. 

Far to the north, on the frigid cliffs of Nottis, she scraped chunks of ice from the walls and blended them with hooch of her own distillation to make fabulous sno-cones in every color. She ate so much of the sweet blended ice that her head hurt and she teleported herself home to convalesce. Friendly neighbors had watered her trees and squeezed her chickens while she was gone, and the last few missing boards from her unfinished tower had been nailed into place and painted over by some kind stranger. Truly, the end of the world was bringing out the best in glitchen. Young as she was, not even a year old, really, Skymaw had almost forgot this feeling of... 

Comfort. Ur was the best place that could be, the best place _imaginable_. 

Skymaw had been a devout Mabbite from the start, though she was prudent to give thanks to every giant, for their giant imagination which kept her alive. In her early days, she had gained much favor with Grendaline and Spriggan, and even Pot looked kindly upon her. But in the last days of Ur, her wandering caught the many eyes of the Giant of Exploration, and she was showered with the favor of Lem. Whenever in her travels she came upon a shrine carved with the branched arrows of Lem, Skymaw paused from her wandering to sit and contemplate, and if she had anything of value she made an offering. Soon her favor with Lem eclipsed all other giants, even her beloved Mab, to whom she'd always dedicated her crops and herbs. Shiny golden emblems accumulated in her traveling pack. When she came home to make sure her garden patch was looked after, she stowed the emblems in her house and backyard, where they overflowed from the kitchen table and piled high under the spice tree. 

The farther Skymaw traveled, the more roads opened before her. Lem's favor shone like a beacon, guiding her through the watery depths of Jal and Samudra, kicking her bare feet to reach the sunlit shallows, or sinking into the shadowy depths. She chased slippery salmen which invariably escaped her grasp. She jumped gleefully down the Great Hole to Ix, and wandered that place's strange streets, alighting their endless flights of steps before crossing Uralia to climb down the darkest depths of Ilmenskie. Twice she died, and found herself in Hell, where she followed the grim trails and shadows down to their very end. Hell's bartender sold her a bottle of hellish wine, which she added to her collection of dubious substances. 

As the final days of Ur creeped ever nearer, there was no experience so outlandish or bizarre that Skymaw would not try it. Her knowledge of alchemy served her well when she sampled a strange powder and raced her way across a dozen strangers' home streets, energized by some dubious chemical formula. Moreso when she imbibed a tincture and paid a floating, ethereal visit to a being that called itself the Scion of Purple. She spoke to ghosts of dead glitchen and discovered fragments of her own DNA, replicated directly from the imaginations of all eleven giants. She traversed forests, leaping from branch to branch, devouring the spinach she had raised in her garden when her own feet wouldn't carry her high enough. She climbed every cliff and descended every ladder she could find, peeked into fox reserves and trundled through swamps. She rode the subways and tumbled through the Seams, collecting secret keys to secret doorways and trading them in a word-of-mouth market made up of drifters, vagabonds and lost glitchen souls. 

Weary but satisfied, Skymaw made her homecoming near the end of Bruise month. Pulling off her traveling boots, now faded and stained with the mud of many journeys, she gathered together all her shiny golden emblems, signs of Lem's expansive favor, and imagined them into an icon, one dedicated to the giant who had made her last days on Ur so memorable. She had not seen everything there was to see, nor done everything there was to do, but as the last days of Ur crawled by her, Skymaw found that she was satisfied with the way she had lived her life. In her house she found her old clothes, the ones she was wearing when the giants had imagined her into being. It seemed appropriate for her to wear them as she took one last walk down the length of her home street, her own private domain. 

Butterflies flittered around the butterfly stick. The fruit trees were heavy with fragrant pink blossoms. A still stood empty of hooch by the dry, unplanted herb garden. Skymaw sat down and closed her eyes, listening to the wind rustling in the leaves. It had been a good life... but she wished that it could last a little bit longer. With a silent goodbye to Ur and all that was in it, she drifted off into her last sleep. 

**Author's Note:**

> The name "Skymaw" was taken from the book _Dragon Keeper_ by Robin Hobb. I never expected her to become an OC I wrote about, which is why the name isn't of my own invention. Any connection between the two characters is... highly unlikely.


End file.
